"For Heaven's sake stop, and speak to me in earnest for a moment. Is this all true that Bridget has been swearing?" "I would not keep a servant who would swear against the truth, Mr. Finiston." "Will you answer me one more question, as May, not as Bridget? Why have you refused to marry Mr. Lee ?" "For a great many reasons. A great many more than I have time to tell you now. The tea will be waiting, and I must give an account of myself." "The tea waiting! I declare it shall wait until I hear my sentence from your lips, May! Do you remember all I said that last evening four weeks ago?" "Yes; I remember it. You were very uncivil." "I was mad. I am an unhappy person to have anything to do with. I am of a dangerous nature, uncertain, and moody." "Do you think I am so stupid as not to have found out all that long ago ?" "And in spite of all that, May, will you marry me?" "I will, Paul. That is, if you would like it very much." "Like it! Oh my darling!" "But the tea, Paul! The tea will be cold. And the whole house will be turning out with lanterns to look for me.' Nevertheless the tea went on cooling for at least ten minutes longer; and when May slipped in at last to take her seat behind the teapot she was rebuked as she deserved by her Aunt Martha. "I met a friend, Aunty," she said; "and he is coming in to see you." "A friend!" said Miss Martha; and then Paul appeared. UNDER THE SEA. THE last gentleman who, in the interests of this periodical, made a pilgrimage under the sea, was lowered down in a divingbell from the Admiralty Pier Works at Dover, was dressed in a costume apparently modelled on that of the wicked smuggler in a transpontine drama, had acute pains in his ears and head, and seems to have seen nothing but the lumps of chalk and flint lying side by side at the bottom of the Channel. Things are very much improved since then. We go under the sea, down a broad flight of stairs, dressed with our usual elegant simplicity, and without the smallest trouble in our head or ears. Moreover, on arriving at our destination, instead of being relegated to the company of a stupid diver, we find a learned and enthusiastic guide awaiting us; and, instead of lumps of flint and chalk, we see around us all kinds of fish and other marine animals brought together with great difficulty, watched over, nourished, and preserved with unwearied care, and affording to the natural history student greater opportunity for study and inspection than he has ever previously met with. For we are under the sea at the Crystal Palace Aquarium, and our companion is Mr. W. A. Lloyd, its excellent superintendent. It is curious to note the difference which has taken place in the principles on which aquaria are constructed since the erection of the Marine Aqua-Vivarium, as it was called, in the Zoological Gardens of the Regent's Park, a description of which was published in Household Words nearly eighteen years ago. Truth to tell, the knowledge of the subject was then very limited; it was known that marine and fresh-water animals could be kept alive in unchanged sea or river water by the action of growing vegetation, but the vegetation was expected to do too much, and accordingly in those days aquaria were kept in light and warm places. almost, in fact, under the condition of conservatories, while the tanks themselves containing the collection were glazed on all sides so as to admit as much light as possible. Moreover, no care was taken to observe the proportions of the tanks, and hence the water in them was piled up tall masses instead of being spread out in shallow ones, so as to absorb as much atmospheric air as possible by surface contact. The result was that the collections were kept too warm, and the water not having in its too high temperature power to contain a sufficiency of oxygen, the animals died rapidly. An attempt was made to increase the amount of oxygen by unduly stimulating the vegetation under excessive light, but the consequence was that the plant life grew too luxuriantly and choked up everything; the water became green and dirty, and quite unfit for the maintenance of animals. This being the in Not so in Paris, however, where, in 1860 and 1861, at the Jardin d'Acclimatization, Mr. Lloyd, our present curator, introduced aquarium keeping in a much better manner. He lessened the quantity of glass in every tank from four pieces to one piece, and decreased the amount of light and heat, thereby at once tending to keep the vegetation to its proper service, that of being an auxiliary only for the supply of oxygen, or rather for the decomposition of the carbonic acid gas evolved by the animals, the carbon being absorbed by the plants, and the oxygen set free for the animals' use. Further, by keeping the sea and fresh water in perpetual motion day and night in streams, Mr. Lloyd was enabled to infinitely increase the oxygenating surfaces exposed to the air; and he also hit upon a better way of introducing the vegetation which, at that time, was put in either growing on stones, or rooted in shingle or sand. This last discovery Mr. Lloyd shall tell in his own words. "One day I saw bright bubbles of air rising from a corner of a drinking glass in a bird-cage, the corner, difficult to get at, being left uncleaned. The sun was shining on the glass where the bubbles were rising, and I suspected them to be oxygen gas, so scraping away a little of the green stuff from the glass and examining it under a microscope, I found it was spontaneously growing vegetation. Henceforward, therefore, beginning in Paris, I depended only on the self-coming plants, the germs of which abound in all waters, and need only exposure to light to make the plants themselves appear." These, and other improvements, were developed in an aquarium built under Mr. Lloyd's superintendence by the Zoological Society at Hamburg, and opened under his management in 1864, and which, at the time of its construction, was the best specimen of its class in Europe, and still remains the best one on the Continent. Neither in size nor arrangement, however, is it to be compared to the establishment at Sydenham. The aquarium is at the northern, or, as it is more generally called, at the "tropical" end of the Crystal Palace, on a portion of the site ravaged by the fire of 1866, and occupying ground nearly four hundred feet in length and seventy feet in breadth. Besides those portions open to the inspection of the public, there are a workroom, a steam-engine and boiler-room, a receptacle for the heating apparatus, two storerooms, an attendants' gallery running from end to end, and an office. One side of the principal gallery is divided into eighteen large tanks; through the glazed side of each you look into a kind of rocky cavern, alive with monsters of the deep, whose learned names you can read on a ledge before you, but with whose personal appearance you have hitherto only been familiar in connexion with fresh salad or melted butter. Here, in separate compartments, are our old friends the sole and the plaice; the whiting, whose normal state it does not appear to be to have his tail in his mouth; the lobsters, who do not seem quite so ill at ease as when they are wedged together on a corner of the fishmonger's slab; the crawfish, hobbling up and down his sanded floor, so like the pantaloon whom we saw in last night's pantomime; the filmy shrimp, reminiscent of Gravesend, where he is spoken of without his "h," and devoured in large quantities with tea; and the greedy prawn. There are about twenty thousand gallons of salt water contained in these tanks, while the large reservoir running from end to end of the saloon holds eighty thousand gallons more. The sea-water in the tanks, which is maintained at a uniform temperature of from fifty to sixty degrees, is kept in good order by being in constant circulation, being pumped into day and night from the large reservoir below. A double set of machinery; two boilers, each of four horse power, two steam-engines, each of three horse power, and two of Forbes's patent pumps; is devoted to effecting this circulation, one of each article being at work while the other is in reserve. This sea-water, which needs thus never to be changed, year after year, and which weighs a million pounds, was brought up by the Brighton Railway at merely nominal rates of cost, through the kindness of the general manager, Mr. Knight. The pipes through which the water passes are made of vulcanite or hard india-rubber, incorrodible by sea-water deposit, and with the water forced from the main pipe into all these tanks through jets is mixed a great quantity of air, which, in a cone-like cloud of minute bubbles, can be seen forcing its way to the bottom, and thus aërating the tank as the body of the sea is aerated by the rush of the passing waves. It is observable, also, that the ventilation everywhere is remarkably good, and that in the entire series of sixty tanks (for in addition to those we have named there are upwards of forty others, in twenty of which, containing small specimens, the view is through the surface of the water as well as through the front glasses, while the other twenty-one are reserve receptacles) there is not one which cannot be brought, when needed, into free contact with the open air. A very cursory inspection will show that the expectations of the success of this aquarium are based upon the fact that in its construction the useful and the practical have been studied, rather than the ridiculous theatrical decoration with which its predecessors have been disfigured. In most of the continental aquaria (notably in the aquarium at Berlin, which cost forty-five thousand pounds, and which may be cited as a splendid specimen of costly wrong-doing), money has been lavishly expended upon decoration of rockwork, which is placed outside the tanks, with the view of giving the spectators the idea that they are in a submarine grotto. This is an expensive attempt at deception, which deceives no one, and is utterly useless. That rockwork is essential for the comfort of the animals we grant, but then it must be placed, as at the Crystal Palace, inside the tank. Errors such as this are seldom, if ever, committed by any educated naturalist, but spring from the fertile brain of the scenic artist or theatrical property-man; and hence, when they exist, it may be judged that they never coexist with the right spirit which contrives and conducts what is purely a natural history exhibition with permanent success. they have secured, and which, in many cases, is so big in comparison with their own size, that they are compelled to drop it before they reach the spot were they had hoped to devour it in safety. From prawns to lobsters is a natural step, and pausing before the tank where these lastnamed specimens are contained, our guide informs us that they are on the whole a maligned race, being accredited with an amount of bad temper, and an inclination for free - fighting, which they certainly do not possess. One noticeable point in the physical organisation of the lobster is, that should one of its legs become injured, the lobster immediately drops it off, the point of severance being at the last joint close to the body; no bleeding ensues, for a skin immediately forms over the stump, and a new limb then begins to grow. It will be strange, perhaps, to the uninitiated to learn that the lobster casts its shell as the snake casts its skin or the bird moults its feathers. When the fish becomes aware of this approaching event conscious that during the time of its indisposition it will be utterly helpless in the event of attack, in its soft state, when other animals can easily tear it up as foodit establishes itself beneath a shelving rock, with a rock on either side, and burrowing into a hole, throws up the sand and shingle which it has thus displaced, as a kind of earthwork in front of it. When the shell is finally cast, the lobster is in a state of exhaustion, but remaining perfectly quiet its vigour returns, and in about three days the new shell has become hard and strong enough to enable its wearer to pursue its ordinary life. In this same tank is the great spiny lobster or crawfish, differing from its fellows in the fact that its limbs are single-clawed, and that its external antennæ are furnished with sharp bristling points, enabling it to repel any troublesome attack, such attacks being always made from the promptings of hunger, never from spite, as with man. It is now, however, time more closely to inspect the inhabitants of the tanks, and our first halt is made before number seventeen, at the far end, where are the prawns. At the moment of our arrival but few of these gentry seemed to be about, and we saw nothing but half a dozen prawns walking with great dignity over the shingle and rocks at the bottom of the tank, as though enjoying a constitutional. In other tanks are specimens of the The next instant a shower of food, con- conger-eel and the fresh-water eel, the lat sisting of chopped mussel, was poured ter living perfectly well in sea-water, both into the tank, and not merely did the hiding by day and searching for their food promenading prawns relax their dignity at night; soles and flounders swimming and strike upwards in search of their gracefully, the former with a snake-like, dinner, but the whole scene changed in an undulating motion; cod, of which there are instant. From the rocks to which they eight members of its family present, all had been clinging, or under which they of them feeding well and growing fast, inhad been concealing, came prawns including whiting. Of the labridæ, so-called scores, all hunting for their food; now tussling with each other for choice morsels, now swimming away with the prize which because of their protusile lips (or wrasses in their English name), there are several specimens living and flourishing. The male of Labrus mixtus, the blue-striped wrasse, is the most gorgeous fish of the British seas: its body is marked with longitudinal bands of most brilliant blue on a ground of greenish brown bronze, while the fins are of deep yellow bordered with blue. The female is of a light red colour, with black and white spots on the back. As these beauties in the male cannot be well discerned in the ordinary way, they have been accommodated with a special tank, swimming in which they can be looked down upon obliquely from above. In neighbouring tanks are the dragonet, the sharp spines on whose gill-covers can inflict wounds when he is handled, and the brilliantly glowing green of the eyes of which, combined with its gorgeous hues generally, especially in the male, makes it deserve its English epithet of gemmeous dragonet. The gobies and blennies, which are so tame that they will suffer themselves to be taken up in the hand, and will sometimes feed there, are also present. There, too, is the sea-water stickle-back, which builds itself a regular nest of seaweed sewn together with threads exuded from its body (as spiders exude the materials for their webs), the greedy bullhead, the gurnard, with elegant jay-like winged pectoral fins, and the poisonous weever. Our guide has reserved to the last the real lions of the aquarium, the octopus and the sea anemones. which the creature forcibly ejects from a short pipe or funnel, and by altering the position of which, it can change the direction of its progress. Shrimps are the food on which the octopus and its near relative, the eledone, in the same tank, live, and when they are hungry they sally forth from their home and drop down over the sand where the shrimps are burrowing. These feel their persecutors and endeavour to fly, but the thin webbed skin connecting the eight feet of the octopus encloses them like a net, and they are the monster's prisoners, to be devoured at his leisure. Of sea anemones, there are in the Crystal Palace Aquarium twenty-one species, all alive and doing well. Of these the largest is the Tealia crassicornis, or thick-horned anemone, which, owing to its great size, sometimes ten inches across when fully expanded, permits its interior to be easily examined. The smallest in the aquarium is never more than one-tenth of an inch in diameter at its greatest stretch. Although to the uninstructed and unobservant eye these anemones appear to belong to the vegetable rather than to the animal kingdom, looking like specimens of weed or fungus, only two, they being coral, out of the twenty-one specimens in the Crystal Palace Aquarium are absolutely non-locomotive, being fixed immovably during the whole of their existence to a hard base. All the others have the power of locomoThe octopus has lately enjoyed a vast tion, accomplished in a snail-like manner, amount of popularity. He has been de- in various degrees: one of them, the pluclared to be the pieuvre, or devil-fish, which mose anemone, having been known to travel attacked the hero of Victor Hugo's Toilers from three to six inches in twenty-four of the Sea, and it has been declared of him hours. The anemones are carnivorous, that he will leave the water and attack a and are fed with the flesh of the mussel, man on the shore. Certainly in any con- which is cut into small pieces, and being test with the octopus in the Crystal Palace handed to them by an attendant, with a Aquarium, either in or out of the water, a pair of wooden tongs, is grasped by the man would have much the best of it. The tentacles, and by them conveyed to the octopus belongs to the family of "cuttles," mouth in the centre of the topmost disc, and is a carnivorous mollusc, with a body which, gaping open, receives it and passes enclosed in a soft, thick, tough, elastic bag, it into the stomach. The high state of instead of being enclosed-as in the case health of this collection of anemones is of the whelk, who is the poor relation of shown by the fact that they are almost the same family-in a hard spiral shell. all nearly constantly open, even by day, For a foot the octopus has a broad flat this being the normal condition of anemones organ, cut up radially into eight strips, in the sea, where they are seldom closed, which are armed on their under surfaces save when in the act of taking food, or with rows of cup-shaped suckers, with when stranded. In the Crystal Palace, which it can take firm hold even after indeed, they are quite as much expanded death. The bases of the eight feet are by day as by night, though, with one exconnected by a thin webbed skin, and ception (anthea), they are nocturnal. when the animal wishes to shoot back- the process of seeing them and the other wards through the water these bases are animals fed is very popular, especially with drawn together, while the swiftness of the the visitors on Saturday afternoons, it motion is increased by the stream of water has been found necessary to make Sunday As a jour maigre, or absolute starvation day, in order to keep them in health. A curious proof of the need of an aquarium such as this, as a means of instruction, is to be found in the fact that most English people, of all classes, refuse to recognise water creatures as "animals." They may be fish, shell-fish, or anything but animals, as of course they are. And now we take leave of our companion, having seen fully enough to be certain that in him the Crystal Palace Aquarium has a most efficient and devoted manager, and the inhabitants of its tanks a loving and intelligent curator, who, from natural ability and long study, knows, perhaps, more than any one else of the habits and necessities of the strange creatures whose home is under the sea. A BATCH OF BALLS. THAT no such weary and laborious task exists as that of marrying one's daughters, any matron will tell us, who, with method and monster drudgery, lays herself to the task. Under the average conditions of the world, it would be Sisyphean. The worn barrister who toils on for fifteen or twenty years before he gets a brief has an agreeable function compared with that of the matron who has to find husbands, instead of briefs, for her three hopeless and helpless daughters. But some blessed philanthropist arose, some angel of mercy, who saw and pitied, and then invented the ball. We shall never lose it, whatever inversions of society take place; we shall always have the ball left. There are, of course, infinite varieties, from the most elementary shape of the pastime to the highest. Here are some personal experiences of the genus. To the hobbledehoy every shape of the delicacy-even the rudest-comes welcome. Like the schoolboy, he has an appetite for what is coarse and indigestible. In that state of life, while sojourning in lodgings by the seaside, I once received an invitation to Mrs. Rudd's soirée, or dance. It was an unpretending attempt, supported by slender resources, but was in reality a tremendous effort. For days before we heard in the shops of Mrs. Rudd's party, and Miss Mirkins, the sole milliner of the place, was known to be busy making up at least two dresses for the same party. The confectioner had received orders, and once repairing there for lunch, I was told that a hawk-like old lady in black, who had been giving orders in a hoarse and confidential way to the chief of the establishment in a corner, was no other than Mrs. Rudd herself. The mansion where the festivities came off was a sort of letting villa, one in a long row, where the lady had taken apartments for the season. When the guest entered the hall, his hat was violently taken from him by a robust country girl, who forthwith attached a large label to the crown by what seemed to be a huge corking-pin ; for the material cracked and crunched under the cruel operation. It was immediately made to form part of a large bank or mound, which was being built up against the wall, and seemed already tottering. Another girl (lent) ran up-stairs to announce, and showed me to the hawk-faced hostess, who was dressed in a limp, black dress, and seemed to be allowed the privilege, as hostess, of being distinguished by an almost squalidness of attire. The room, a little lodging-house drawing-room, had been almost left bare, the furniture had been cleared out, and a few chairs were set round the wall with quite regimental accuracy. I saw the company arrive, who all entered with a sort of delight, as if after a long separation. The gentlemen were jocular; the ladies high-spirited; at whom a number of apparent spinsters seated round, their backs laid against the wall, gazed with delight. There was infinite zest and spirit over the whole-various young men always coming up to the hostess to consult or give advice, proud of their important relations with her, and she directing them in a maternal way. But there was a difficulty about the music. To gain room the family instrument, a cottage, with that guitar-like tone which such war-worn veterans commonly have, had been put outside the door, and at it Wilkie, the wellknown stationer and librarian, who also sold cheap music, and this very instrument, presided. On special occasions Wilkie was accustomed to bring a little medicinechest, so it appeared to be, but which he called a euphonion, which was placed on a chair beside him, and on which he played occasionally with his right hand, the effect being of a "jingle-jangle" sort, but in the place considered equal to a fine orchestra. On this occasion he had supplemented his own exertions with what he called a "cello." Yet on this night the united power of all instruments did not carry the music into the room, and the friendly young men held consultations with the hostess, vehemently urging on each other that some change |